A recent, global account of the history of communist parties in political theory and governing practice has argued that the path taken by the Bolsheviks under Stalin’s leadership represented a break with their past as a party of ideas and their transformation into an instrument of policy implementation. It was a triumph, as it were, of organisational expediency over ideology.1 This monograph has presented a different view. For the Bolsheviks, the Party had always been an agent of revolutionary social transformation rather than a mere association of individuals sharing certain political principles. Its structure and mode of operation were determined by the demands of the revolutionary process. Freedom of discussion, political rights and democracy were not ends in themselves but means to a transformation of world–historical scale that would render them redundant by erasing the distinction between state and society and the class structures on which it rested.